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Grab the Popcorn: Elon Musk Just Bought Twitter
The latest episode of As the Twitter-verse Turns is a doozy.
“Don’t introduce a pistol in the first act unless you intend to see it fired in the second,” were the immortal words of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov.
The advice on storytelling, from a master like Chekhov, isn’t just a caution against unnecessary flourishes, though it is that. Art, as we are so often reminded, imitates life. In fact, sometimes life goes out on the unlikeliest of coincidental limbs- limbs even the most hardened sci-fi fantasy writer would find wobbly at best.
“Truth,” another timeless adage tells us, “is often stranger than fiction”; that is what Anton Chekhov was really talking about.
Irony, foreshadowing, unbelievable coincidences, overly dramatic characters that veer into the territory of caricature, a Sword of Damocles introduced during the first act that, in retrospect, was bound to fall at the worst possible moment since the moment it first fell aloft.
The weeks-long saga of Elon Musk versus Twitter has all the elements of great fiction. First Musk acquired a majority stake in Twitter, looked likely to join the board, then refused to do so before offering to buy the company outright. The offer was publicly rejected by Twitter board members, who adopted a poison pill strategy…